


a flame in the wind of death (it trembles ceaselessly)

by ardentintoxication



Series: Hurt/Comfort Bingo [2012] [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: A Wizard Did It, Community: hc_bingo, Everyone Is Poly Because Avengers, Fever, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Pneumonia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Pre-Relationship, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Sickfic, Steve Feels, Tony hates magic, the avengers are a cuddly bunch and I can ship them if I want
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-07
Updated: 2012-12-07
Packaged: 2017-11-19 20:05:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/577151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ardentintoxication/pseuds/ardentintoxication
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the Avengers have a team member to avenge (because science > magic, always). For the hc-bingo prompt "pneumonia."</p>
            </blockquote>





	a flame in the wind of death (it trembles ceaselessly)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starstripedimpala](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=starstripedimpala).



> I swear to God that this fic was only supposed to be 500 words. 
> 
> Dedicated to [starstripedimpala](http://starstripedimpala.tumblr.com/), who loves Steve and was going to help me do canon research before I decided to fuck canon and make my own shit up.
> 
> Title is from the poem "Fire" by Dorothea McKellar.

Tony Stark fucking hates magic.

The first reason is that it fucks with the laws of physics. True, Tony might occasionally bend the laws of physics (and self-preservation, and sanity), but at least he takes physics out for dinner first, then teases physics with just-within-bounds science before whipping out his own Large Hadron Collider and making new elements in his basement. Magic isn't nearly so elegant.

The second reason is that magic users have no sense of fucking  _courtesy_.

Which is why Tony Stark, instead of dashing about like a handsome rogue and lifting falling beams and saving orphans and smacking around arsonists and everything, is carrying a recently-depowered and unconscious Steve Rogers bridal style through a burning orphanage. Which is tangentially related to the third reason Tony Stark hates magic:

Magic can fucking depower Captain America.

"Widow, Hawkeye, you got the kids?" he asks through his commlink.

"Doc's got them," replies Clint. "He's checking them out right now until the ambulances can get here."

Tony swears. "Remind me again to punch these assholes in the face next time I see them. There's fucking with us,  _that_  I can understand-"

"Sir," says JARVIS, "that patch of floor is structurally unsound. I suggest that you find an alternate route."

"-but then there's lighting an orphanage on fire and blocking traffic  _solely_  to fuck with us, because that is just a dick move. JARVIS, divert as much power as you can to thrusters."

"Sir, I sincerely hope you are not going to take my suggestion as a pretext to-"

"You bet your ass I am, JARVIS." Tony shifts Steve to a more comfortable position, curls around him protectively, and turns his back to the wall. "Fire."

Tony flies backward through the window, the armor shielding them from splinters of wood and glass.

He promptly smacks against the brick wall on the other end of the alley, cuts the repulsers, and drops to the ground. Steve flopping around in his arms from the impact would ordinarily be funny, but since he's less "Star Spangled Man" and more "stick insect" at this point, it's just sad. "Widow, can we get Banner over here?"

"After Thor clears out the giant snake blocking traffic on Linden. Sitrep?"

"Steve's not waking up."

* * *

They don't take Steve to a hospital. Bruce is a good enough doctor to take care of all of them (even if that technically wasn't his first calling), and what with various enterprising doctors who think that they can draw a bit of Steve's blood to try and distill the serum or practice open-heart surgery on Tony or vivisect Thor to find out what makes him live so long, the team as a whole prefers the converted lab on Bruce's floor over even SHIELD medical (despite how often Coulson tries to hustle them there for proper care).

The thing that scares Bruce isn't just how small Steve looks without the serum. It's how weak he looks, too. He's not simply thin, he's malnourished, which coupled with his medical history probably means that he's suffering from sort of malnutrition-based immunodeficiency. He's asthmatic, which complicates the smoke inhalation. His lungs are straining against his narrow chest, his breathing thin and rapid to compensate for the lack of air when he isn't coughing, and when he is conscious he complains of a headache and wretches painfully into the toilet. The toilet he can barely walk to on his own.

Bruce is not a strong man, but supporting him so completely makes him feel like it, and it terrifies him.

"How is he?" asks Clint several hours later, after the Avengers minus Steve and Bruce have redirected traffic and visited all the orphans in the hospital.

Bruce sighs. "I've put him on antibiotics, though with my luck he'll turn out to be allergic to penicillin. Right now the last thing we want is for him to get a bacterial infection on top of everything else."

"We're gonna avenge you, Cap," Clint says. "It's kind of what we do."

"I messaged Strange," Natasha says from behind Clint, and Bruce wonders if she was already there or only just wandered in. "He says that it's a very complex spell, but he's confident that it can be reversed. He just needs some time to research."

"Until that time," Thor says, "we should hunt for those who would hurt our Captain, before they grow bold and threaten others."

"That's a good plan," says Tony. "I like that plan. I'll bring the explosives."

* * *

Four days later and Steve is worse.

Thor spends the most time with him, sitting in a chair that's almost too small for him and reciting him stories, in his booming voice, from his childhood on Asgard. It's usually enough to put Steve to sleep, even if he's coughing so hard he thinks he can't.

"And so Ēostre did soothe the Bilgesnipe, which suffered greatly from the thorn in its hide. She took out the painful thing and smoothed egg white and her own spittle over the wound, and lo it healed, for her power was great and good indeed." Thor pauses in his rendition of _The Tale of the Bilgesnipe and the Bunny Rabbit_ to look at Steve.

"Steven," says Thor, "You are shivering."

"It's cold," says Steve faintly. His eyes, which have been closed as he listened, squeeze tight. "Not-" He coughs. "-not ice. Not again."

Thor rests a hand on Steve's forehead. It's burning.

"Doctor Banner!" he says, which sends Bruce running from the radiation charts Tony sent up from his lab downstairs. He runs a temporal thermometer over Steve's forehead, behind his ear, then looks at the reading.

" _Fuck_."

That brings Clint down from the air vents, where he's been sitting, listening patiently, for the past half hour. "What is it?"

"His fever's up to 104," says Bruce, who looks like he's trying not to go green. "I need you to get me some wet washcloths. Cool, not cold." Clint returns in less than a minute with two, and Bruce places one behind his neck and one on his forehead. Steve shudders when they touch.

"Please, no," he mutters. "Not ice."

"Steve," says Bruce, "can you hear me?"

Steve frowns a bit before nodding.

"I need you to take these pills and then drink this," says Bruce, "and then afterwards, you won't feel cold anymore." Steve cautiously opens his mouth, and Bruce puts a tablet of acetaminophen and an antibiotic on his tongue. "This is just water, Steve. Just plain water." Steve drinks carefully, then greedily, and how preoccupied _was_ Bruce to not notice that he hadn't drunk for so long?

Not one notices Clint taking the seat opposite Thor and holding Steve's hand; or, if they do, they don't say anything.

* * *

Four days later and they have found _nothing_.

Tony hasn't left his lab since he took his suit off, hasn't slept for more than an hour at a time in the past two days. He's got a conference connection with Strange, he's got various blueprints and designs projected holographically in front of him that he conducts like a symphony, and he is about to fall over from sheer stress.

Natasha brings him coffee sometime around three AM on the fifth day. "His fever's up and he had chills earlier," she informs him. "And delirium."

"Fuck those assholes and the teleporting spell they rode in on."

She nods. "Has Doctor Strange been of any help?"

"He says it's an amazingly complex spell. As far as he can tell, it's a layered time-reversal spell. One layer is what's keeping Steve's mind in the present, and then another layer is taking his body back to the way it was before the serum. Not to mention the other layers that keep it from causing a paradox." Tony rolls his eyes. "However, he can't seem to be able to do anything except tell me how complex and fascinating the whole thing is."

"SHIELD has intel on the group behind it, at least," says Natasha, handing him a flash drive. He connects it to a USB port and opens the files.

"That's them, alright," says Tony, nodding at the people in cloaks and silly hats. "'Your puny science only corrupts the human form!'" he says in his most obnoxious, high-pitched, nasal voice. "'Only magic can bring us closer to true power! Mwahahaha!'" He scoffs.

Natasha shuffles the projections with her hands. "This isn't their first try at this. They're an offshoot of Neo-Luddites that disagreed with the official stance on magic. They believe that magic is more pure than technology. They've been doing this sort of thing for years, mostly just threatening hexes to Mac Geniuses, but-"

"-this is their first crack at somebody big. Somebody noticeable." Tony snaps his fingers. "This is just Stage One. This was their beta testing, and now they know that they can go after anyone if they just have the right spell. They went after Steve because I can rebuild my suit if I need to. He can't rebuild himself."

"So we find their next target," says Natasha. "Someone else for whom science is inherently part of them."

Tony slides a hand across the projection, bringing up his blueprints again. "I've been working on a tracker. They pop up somewhere, we'll know exactly where they are."

"You're sure?"

"What, you doubt my genius?" asks Tony, hand over arc reactor. "I'm hurt. Oh, ye of little faith." He brings up a couple of equations and some camera footage of the orphanage fire. "I had JARVIS analyze the footage and readings. They've got a very unique energy signature. Their spells shouldn't be able to cloak them because all magic is energy, and you can't hide energy. If they use the same teleportation spell - and they likely will because they don't know we can track them - then we should be able to find out exactly where they are, even if they're able to fly under the radar of other tech like JARVIS. No offense, JARVIS."

"None taken, sir."

He stares at the footage, watches Steve shrink as their leader cackles menacingly. "And they still think science is inferior."

"When should it be ready?" asks Natasha, the merest hint of a grin curling the corner of her mouth.

"Actually," says Tony, "it should be ready as soon as JARVIS finishes calibrating it to the signature. Which is when, JARVIS?"

"Ten minutes and thirty-nine seconds, sir."

"Fantastic," says Tony.

Natasha gets up and leaves Tony alone, returning seven minutes later with two cups of something warm. Not coffee. Tea. It's sweet and tastes of raspberry jam.

"Good job," she says, and that's high praise, coming from someone who could snap a bad guy's spine with her bare hands. Tony smiles. Neither of them talks about their feelings, their mutual worry about Steve. Neither of them do the emotions talk thing very well.

The machine beeps immediately after it calibrates, and Tony looks up in surprise. "That was fast." He gets up, looks at the readings on his projection. "This can't be right. It's says they're right here in the tower. Right now."

"Does it say where?" says Natasha, drawing her gun.

"Medical wing. With Steve. JARVIS, suit me up."

Natasha swears. "No, not Steve. _Bruce_."

* * *

Bruce is alone with Steve, who has finally settled into something like sleep, when he hears the crackle of magic behind him. He has three seconds to grab a scalpel from his medical bag before he's picked up and tossed against the wall.

It _hurts_.

It hurts and he's scared and that used to be enough to make him change automatically, but he takes the rage and the fear and the pain and channels it somewhere else. He lets it bleed into the fist he's making around the scalpel, in the way he forces himself to get up, to turn, to face the people who would dare to invade his home, his sanctuary. He forces his anger to radiate through his eyes. He's not going to change, not now, but that's no reason not to let them think otherwise.

There's only three of them, an in-charge looking guy and a man and a woman. Their leader, who is classic supervillain with a high-necked cape and a curling mustache and goatee, laughs, and waves his staff and speaks some words that pick Bruce up and throw him into the wall again. He twists just before impact, clutching the scalpel tight and holding it away from him so he doesn't accidentally stab himself.

"So," drawls the leader. "The great Doctor Banner."

So he's monologuing, and apparently he's after Bruce personally. This day is just getting better and better.

"I think," says Bruce, "that the longer you stand there and threaten me, the more likely I am to get angry. And believe me, you wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

"Ah," says the leader, who Bruce mentally dubs Snidely Whiplash, "but there's something you're not telling us, isn't there, doctor?" He waves his staff and Bruce is pinned and slid up the wall. "You're not content with this dual life, are you? This isn't love, Doctor. It's atonement." Bruce is trying to not let this guy get to him, but it isn't exactly easy. Snidely Whiplash smiles, noticing a hit. "You're not doing this out of love," he says, gesturing to the room at large. "You do this to ease your guilt, at the people you've killed with your arrogance and ignorance. And now your wish," he says, waving his staff, "is granted."

Several things happen at once.

Steve Rogers is somehow not asleep, and has picked up the heavy tray that Bruce keeps on a trolley beside his bed to hold his tools and thrown it like a lopsided discus at the leader's head. It bounces off his temple and he looks around in surprise, breaking his concentration. Bruce falls to the floor with a thud, dropping the scalpel.

A gunshot is deafening and unmistakeable from a small corner of the floor, and the female henchman is down, a bullet wound to the back of her calf.

A small section of the ceiling drops on top of both the male henchman and their leader, and Tony Stark, in his suit, looks around expectantly.

"Did I miss anyone?"

"You missed this one," says Natasha, keeping her gun trained on the female henchmen.

"Damn," says Tony. "Oh well, two out of three ain't bad."

Bruce groans. Everyone still conscious turns quickly to stare at him. "Are we okay?" asks Natasha, her voice smooth and calm.

Bruce shakes his head, holds still, then nods. He takes a deep breath. Then another. "For now."

"We'll let you blow off some steam in a second, big guy," says Tony, "but first we need to ask Willow here some questions."

"Now," says Natasha, looking deep into the henchwoman's eyes. "You have gotten away with this for so long because you've been subtle. But then you got arrogant and arrogance made you stupid. You do not invade my home and expect to get away with it. _So_ ," she says, and the woman flinches, "you have _three options_. Option one: You tell us how to take the spell off him-" she jerks her head in Steve's direction without taking her eyes off the woman, "-and you can walk away. Option two: you take the spell off him yourself, and _you can walk away_. Option three: You decide to be stupid and arrogant, and pretend that I am not being serious when I say this: you don't tell us anything, and we will not be merciful, and we will still have two other people who can just as easily tell us what we need to know." Her smile doesn't reach her eyes. "Choose."

* * *

Steve breathes.

He opens his eyes, clears his throat, looks at the hand he uses to cover his mouth. It is no longer skeletal. He doesn't know whether to think of it as being back in his old body or out of it, and he's not sure if it's as uncomfortable and awkward as it was the first time. At least, if changing again hurt, he doesn't remember it. He's grateful for that.

"Did we-"

"Yeah, we did, Cap," says Clint. "The goons came clean, confessed their whole plan. It really was a treat to watch; Nat was scary as all hell."

Natasha's facial expression doesn't change, but there's a slight shift in her stance that in a different woman would be considered preening.

"And as a bonus we sent their spell lists to Doctor Strange," says Tony. "Sure, it turned out we didn't need him, but he gets to play with all their toys and they can't complain." He looks suspiciously chipper, and Steve makes a mental note to hustle him into bed as soon as possible.

"I must admit I regret my absence in this battle," says Thor. "Had I not succumbed to weariness, I might have brought the might of Mjölnir down upon their skulls and they would have known my wrath."

"We all need sleep, big guy," says Clint, punching Thor in the shoulder.

"You're finishing your antibiotics run," says Bruce quietly. The lines in his forehead are subtly thicker, and he's moving stiffly, and Steve knows what Bruce looks like in the aftermath of the Other Guy and decides to talk to him later, even if it's just to thank him for taking care of him. He needs the acknowledgement that he does good in the world. "I don't care that your immune system is superhuman, we're not unleashing antibiotic-resistant strains of whatever you have on a non-superhuman population-"

"Excuse me," says JARVIS, "but Agent Coulson informs me that there are giant tarantulas in Queens."

Steve hoists himself out of bed. He will not admit that staying in bed and being taken care of made him feel useless and that he needs to get back to work, but it seems that everyone understands without his saying it. "Avengers, assemble."

**Author's Note:**

> I played a little fast-and-loose with actual medical science to make this fic. This is because Google can only tell you so much and none of my friends has ever had pneumonia. And ridiculously high fevers sparking delirium is dramatic.
> 
> Steve is the hardest character for me to write because I can't really get a grip on his personality, so I apologize for rendering him unconscious or delirious for most of this fic.
> 
> The villains in this story are entirely of my own invention. If there are any Neo-Luddites in the Marvel Universe, I would find it hilarious.


End file.
